Penn Press Log

This Week's New Books: Matching Organs with Donors, Divine Art, Infernal Machine, Not in This Family, Sweet Liberty

Matching Organs with Donors: Legality and Kinship in Transplants Marie-Andrée Jacob 248 pages | 6 x 9 Cloth | ISBN 978-0-8122-4432-8 | $65.00 | £42.50 Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0650-0 | $65.00 | £42.50 A volume in the Contemporary Ethnography series This sensitive ethnography reveals the methods and mindsets of doctors, patients, donors, and sellers in Israel's living kidney transplant bureaus. Matching Organs with Donors describes how these actors identify and adjudicate suitable matches between donor and recipient using terms borrowed from definitions of kinship.

Now in Paperback Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending Elizabeth L. Eisenstein 384 pages | 6 x 9 | 24 illus. Cloth  | ISBN 978-0-8122-4280-5 | $45.00 | £29.50 Paper | ISBN 978-0-8122-2216-6 | $26.50 | £17.50 Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0467-4 | $26.50 | £17.50 A volume in the Material Texts series The author of the hugely influential The Printing Press as an Agent of Change offers a magisterial and highly readable account of five centuries of ambivalent attitudes toward printing and printers. Once again, she makes a compelling case for the ways in which technological developments and cultural shifts are intimately related.

Now in Paperback Not in This Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North America Heather Murray 312 pages | 6 x 9 | 25 illus. Cloth 2010 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4268-3 | $45.00 | £29.50 Paper 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2224-1 | $24.95 | £16.50 Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0740-8 | $24.95 | £16.50 A volume in the Politics and Culture in Modern America series Not in This Family shows how gays and their heterosexual parents both have animated each other's sensibilities, consciousness, and even culture and politics. Author Heather Murray suggests a reciprocal family life and complicates the notion of gay banishment.

Now in Paperback Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss 312 pages | 6 x 9 | 7 illus. Cloth 2009 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4172-3 | $39.95 | £26.00 Paper 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2227-2 | $24.95 | £16.50 Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0356-1 | $24.95 | £16.50 A volume in the Early American Studies series Sweet Liberty offers a history of Martinique and its relationship to metropolitan France during the final years of slavery in the French empire. It argues that an Atlantic-world approach reveals how race, slavery, class, and gender shaped what it meant to be French on both sides of the ocean.

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson. Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

"O-hi-o!" At’s how sed it: American Indian Poetry from Changing Is Not Vanishing

Bertrand N. O. Walker is the third poet featured our September blog series marking the paperback release of Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930, edited by Robert Dale Parker. Walker was born around 1870 in what is now Kansas. He published his poems under his Wyandot name, Hen-toh. In his later works "Hen-toh adopted the patterns of speech he heard among Wyandot speakers whose English sometimes drew on Wyandot grammar," says Parker. This poem first appeared in 1924, three years before Walker's death.

Wyandot Names

“O-he-zhuh”! ’Ats how sed it, Wyandots;
“O-hee-oh”! ’At’s how say, Frenchman;
“O-hi-o’!” At’s how sed it, Long Knives;
    ’An’ it’s mean, beautiful riva’.

“To-roon-toh”! ’At’s what say, ol’ Wyandots;
“To-ron-toh”! ’At’s what call it, French;
“To-ron-to”! ’At’s what say, British;
    An’ it’s mean, great rock standing.

“Sci-non-to”! It’s that way in Wyandot;
“Sci-yun-toh”! ’At’s what sed, French; 10
“Sci-o-to”! ’At’s how sed Long Knives;
    ’An’ it’s mean, plenty deer.

I’d Like to Thank the Academy—and the Copyeditor

I’d Like to Thank the Academy—and the Copyeditor
A Guest Post by Caroline Winschel

After I had been working at the Press for about six months, I was visiting my mother and noticed a familiar spine on her bookshelf: it was a copy of Kirsten A. Fudeman’s Vernacular Voices: Language and Identity in Medieval French Jewish Communities. Because my mother is neither a medievalist nor a reader of monographs, I asked her why she had the book.

“Because it has your name in it!”
Of course. Thanks, Mom.

When a book is first published, the advance copies that arrive in our office are carefully inspected by our production manager before they are deemed suitable for distribution and sale. By the time I get a copy, it’s already received her seal of approval, and there’s nothing left for me to check. I like to think that this justifies what I do check: the acknowledgments. Following the model presented by many of my senior colleagues, I flip to the back matter and scan the assembled thank-yous for my name.

Even when I’m not skimming for the sake of my ego, I like reading an author’s acknowledgments. There’s something very satisfyingly voyeuristic about seeing to whom—and how—an author offers her thanks. One of the very first books I worked on at the Press referenced a number of my college professors in the acknowledgments; although the author’s experience at our shared alma mater had been decades before mine, I was heartened to learn that she’d faced some of the same withering stares during her honors seminars. Another author, fresh out of grad school, had hidden jokes throughout his acknowledgments, and I still wonder if he invented the person who was identified only by his or her initials—and I wonder what foul thing the initials stood for!

Paul's Pick: a Free Article from Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft

Every month, Paul Chase in the Penn Press Journals department invites our blog readers to download a complimentary article from one of our many scholarly journals.

Paul's Pick for September is "Current Trends in the Application of Cognitive Science to Magic" by Edward Bever at SUNY College of Old Westbury.

Bever writes that "evolutionary psychologists have developed increasingly sophisticated, although still controversial,theories explaining in terms of natural selection the reasons that specific cognitive capabilities became hard-wired into our brains." Yet, he observes "Historians of magic have paid relatively little attention to this fundamental change in our understanding of how the mind works."

Bever's article will appear in the Summer issue of the Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft.

Click here to download this free article and learn more about the interdisc.

Check the Penn Press Log in October for Paul's next pick.

This Week's New Books: Death by Effigy, Exquisite Mixture, and Textual Mirrors

Death by Effigy: A Case from the Mexican Inquisition Luis R. Corteguera 240 pages | 6 x 9 | 11 illus. Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4439-7 | $39.95 | £26.00 Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0705-7 | $39.95 | £26.00 A volume in the Early Modern Americas series On July 21, 1578, a small Mexican town awoke to the news of a scandal. Nailed to the door of its church was a double-faced effigy denouncing a neighbor as a Jew who should burn at the stake. Nine trials over the course of four years revealed a story of dishonor, revenge, and the Inquisition's relentless determination to defend its symbols.

Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England Wolfram Schmidgen 280 pages | 6 x 9 Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4442-7 | $59.95 | £39.00 Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0718-7 | $59.95 | £39.00 A volume in the Haney Foundation Series Exquisite Mixture examines the writing of Robert Boyle, John Locke, Daniel Defoe, and others in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain who advocated mixture as a critical element of this belief in English superiority: mixture could produce superior languages, new species, flawless ideas, and resilient civil societies.

Textual Mirrors: Reflexivity, Midrash, and the Rabbinic Self Dina Stein 248 pages | 6 x 9 Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4436-6 | $79.95 | £52.00 Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0694-4 | $79.95 | £52.00 A volume in the Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion series In Textual Mirrors, Dina Stein draws on literary theory, folklore studies, and semiotics to closely examine midrashic tales in which self-reflexivity operates as a central element. Within these texts, rabbinic discourse itself becomes the object of reflection, both complicating and confirming its religious and ideological principles.

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson. Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

The Genius of That Mountain: American Indian Poetry from Changing Is Not Vanishing

John Rollin Ridge/ Yellow Bird

"Mount Shasta," the second poem in our September blog series marking the paperback release of Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930, was written by John Rollin Ridge. Ridge often published as Yellow Bird, the English translation of his Cherokee name, Chees-quat-a-law-ny. Born in 1827 to an influential family of farmers and slaveholders in Georgia, he received an excellent education. His father and grandfather were assassinated by an opposing faction of the Cherokee Nation who viewed them as traitors for signing the 1835 Treaty of New Echota and agreeing to give up their land to the United States government. By 1850, John Rollin Ridge had settled in California, where he became a newspaper editor and political leader.

"In 1854 he published the first-known novel by an American Indian (and the first novel written in California), The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit," writes Robert Dale Parker, editor of Changing Is Not Vanishing. "As a poet, Ridge was a remarkable lyric talent, arguably at least among the several most powerful American poets before Whitman. He seems to have seen the Shelleyan 'Mount Shasta' as standing out from the rest of his poems. He included it in The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, and it appeared as the first poem in his book of poems, which his wife published posthumously in 1868, titling it simply Poems."

Mount Shasta

    Behold the dread Mt. Shasta, where it stands
Imperial midst the lesser heights, and, like
Some mighty unimpassioned mind, companionless
And cold. The storms of Heaven may beat in wrath
Against it, but it stands in unpolluted
Grandeur still; and from the rolling mists upheaves
Its tower of pride e’en purer than before.
The wintry showers and white-winged tempests leave
Their frozen tributes on its brow, and it
Doth make of them an everlasting crown.
Thus doth it, day by day and age by age,
Defy each stroke of time: still rising highest
Into Heaven!

This Week's New Books: In the Crossfire and Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters

In the Crossfire: Marcus Foster and the Troubled History of American School Reform John P. Spencer 352 pages | 6 x 9 | 11 illus. Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4435-9 | $34.95 | £23.00 Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0766-8 | $34.95t | £23.00 A volume in the Politics and Culture in Modern America series In the Crossfire brings a much-needed historical perspective to contemporary debates about educational inequality by tracing the life and work of Marcus Foster, an African-American educator who struggled to reform urban schools in the 1960s and early 70s. Read more . . .

Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America Victoria W. Wolcott 328 pages | 6 x 9 | 18 illus. Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4434-2 | $34.95 | £23.00 Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0759-0 | $34.95 | £23.00 A volume in the Politics and Culture in Modern America series Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters tells the story of the battle for access to leisure space in cities across the United States. This detailed and eloquent history shows how African Americans fought to enter segregated amusement areas not only in pursuit of happiness but in connection to a wider movement for racial equality. Read more . .

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson. Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Flaming Wonderer! American Indian Poetry from Changing Is Not Vanishing

Each week in September, we're posting poems from Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930 to mark the paperback release of this unique volume edited by Robert Dale Parker. Little is known about this week's poet, Tso-le-oh-woh. Just after the Klinkerfues comet flew across Indian Territory and the United States in September 1853, his poem "What an Indian Thought When He Saw the Comet" appeared in the Cherokee Advocate, a tribally owned and published newspaper.

What an Indian Thought When He Saw the Comet

Flaming wonderer! that dost leave vaunting, proud
Ambition boasting its lightning fringed
Immensity—cleaving wings, gaudy dipp’d
In sunset’s blossoming splendors bright and
Tinsel fire, with puny flight fluttering
Far behind! Thou that art cloth’d in mistery
More startling and more glorious than thine own
Encircling fires—profound as the oceans
Of shoreless space through which now thou flyest!
Art thou some erring world now deep engulph’d
In hellish, Judgement fires, with phrenzied ire
And fury hot, like some dread sky rocket
Of Eternity, flaming, vast, plunging
Thro’ immensity, scatt’ring in thy track
The wrathful fires of thine own damnation
Or wingest thou with direful speed, the ear
Of some flaming god of far off systems
Within these skies unheard of and unknown?
Ye Gods! How proud the thought to mount this orb
Of fire—boom thro’ the breathless oceans vast
Of big immensity—quickly leaving
Far behind all that for long ages gone
Dull, gray headed dames have prated of—
Travel far off mystic eternities—
Then proudly, on this little twisting ball
Returning once more set foot, glowing with
The splendors of a vast intelligence—
Frizzling little, puny humanity
Into icy horrors—bursting the big
Wide-spread eyeball of dismay—to recount
Direful regions travers’d and wonders seen!
Why I’d be as great a man as Fremont
Who cross’d the Rocky Mountains, didn’t freeze
And’s got a gold mine!

 

This Month's Podcast: Albert Churella and the Pennsylvania Railroad

In the September Penn Press podcast, Albert J. Churella, Associate Professor in the Social and International Studies Department at Southern Polytechnic State University and author of The Pennsylvania Railroad, Volume 1: Building an Empire, 1846-1917, talks about his monumental history of the transportation giant.

From the interview:

Americans are addicted to mobility. Today we take for granted our ability to be mobile with our cars, with aircraft. We think less about the role that trains played in increasing American mobility. But not much more than a hundred years ago, America became a mobile society because of the railroads, and particularly because of the Pennsylvania Railroad. And it was the steady diminution of the operating costs associated with railroads—it was the steady downward spiral of railroad rates—that underwrote American economic expansion, the rise of big business, and the prosperity that ultimately made the United States the leading economic power in the history of the world.

In this clip, Churella considers the Pennsylvania Railroad's most significant accomplishments.

The Pennsylvania Railroad Albert J. Churella by PennPress

The complete interview is available at the Penn Press podcast page.